CRIME

By MARILYN STASIO

Published: August 27, 1989

Someone is killing off all the writers on the Puerto Rican island paradise of Vieques in MAY'S NEWFANGLED MIRTH (Bantam, Paper, $3.50). The first victim is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet. An alcoholic author of pornographic trash is the next scribbler silenced. Shortly after Detective Balthazar Marten, the ''unnervingly competent'' hero of four earlier procedurals in this wonderful series, arrives from San Juan to investigate, a travel writer disappears. Something quick and deadly has slithered into paradise. Mary Jo Adamson works the classical whodunit format with great ingenuity. She writes like a dream, this one, threading into her tale of revenge and retribution ravishing descriptions of the tropical locale and piercingly acute characterizations of the resident locals.

Somewhere on this ''island of soft amber,'' where ''people seem to be stopped in their most characteristic stances, transfixed in liquid gold,'' a murderer is hiding behind the frozen familiarity of his public face. The suspects - from a dissipated intellectual who holds forth at the Esperanza Beach and Tennis Club to a half-crazed street preacher who startles tourists at the airport - are all astonishingly vibrant, but not always what they seem. As much as the killer, everyone else on Vieques seems to operate on the understanding that ''stereotypes were forms of camouflage.'' Even the manzanillo tree disguises its poisons in delicious, fragrant fruit. Apples, of course. *

Is it love or is it subatomic particles that make the world go round? Writing with suitable pomp and erudition in A VERY PARTICULAR MURDER (St. Martin's, $16.95), S. T. Haymon takes this subject dear to theoretical physicists and tosses in a murder.

''I don't like it,'' says the senior police officer investigating the cyanide poisoning of a Nobel laureate at a convocation of British particle physicists. ''There's altogether too much love in the air for comfort.''

Indeed, the murdered physicist was absolutely dotty about his adopted son, a gypsy genius whose new theories on the structure of the universe threaten to put Einstein in the shade. Likewise smitten by the dashing scientist are beautiful virgins, clergymen's wives and stout housekeepers.

Someone's adoration eventually turns to hatred in a Grand Guignol ending that all the force and elegance of Ms. Haymon's stately prose cannot save from becoming ludicrous. In earlier mysteries in this series, Inspector Ben Jurnet's cool intelligence and astringent wit have had a more bracing effect on the author's romantic excesses. Here, however, that attractive hero is distracted by his own lovesickness, a long-distance affair that has him behaving as foolishly as any particle physicist. *

Melodie Johnson Howe's first novel, THE MOTHER SHADOW (Viking, $16.95), introduces a pair of female sleuths patterned after Nero Wolfe and his wisecracking foot soldier, Archie Goodwin. Claire Conrad, the eccentric genius in this combo, is drawn into the dirty domestic affairs of the wealthy Kenilworths when the family patriarch bequeaths her his $4 million coin collection just before he kills himself. Maggie Hill is already in big trouble. As the dead man's secretary, she typed up a codicil, discovered the suicide note and promptly lost possession of both documents.

Nevertheless, Miss Conrad feels that Miss Hill is just the sort of ''snapping, aggressive, untrainable'' dogsbody she's been looking for and takes her on as a partner. ''I succumbed to a moment of whimsy,'' she explains it. ''I was thinking about Holmes and Watson . . . Johnson and Boswell . . . Vance and Van Dine.'' If the prodigious Miss Conrad gets the cleverest lines and the best brainstorms, Miss Hill at least learns to handle a gun and to curb some of her girlishness. The author herself could learn the knack of rationing plot coincidences and of creating plausible secondary characters.

Still, it's fun to watch these newcomers striding brazenly onto Nero Wolfe's own turf. As Archie once observed, with appropriate amusement, of the great one: ''A woman cutting loose is always too much for him.'' *

A London detective who feels ''crippling pity'' for the criminals he arrests and a solicitor who feels ''dangerous compassion'' for those she prosecutes fall naturally and gracefully in love, in A QUESTION OF GUILT (Pocket Books, $16.95), over a murder case that forces these humane feelings to their outer limits. Once past the throat-clearing preliminaries of her first novel, Frances Fyfield, herself a criminal attorney, draws the reader into the same tough questions of conscience that challenge her quietly heroic characters.

On the face of it, there seems no doubt about who did what to whom and for what. Stanislaus Jaskowski, a man with a menial job and big debts, murdered a solicitor's wife, and he did it for money. In making his confession, however, he implicates a wealthy widow whose manipulation of the crime can't be corroborated. Even with the killer in jail and the law building its case against the true instigator, this cunning woman continues her machinations against Jaskowski and his family.

Ms. Fyfield is remarkably thorough in her psychological profiles, giving subtle nuances to characters who are mere passers-by in this psychodrama. If this new author lacks Ruth Rendell's brilliant insight into minds that are profoundly evil, she certainly understands the pathos of those people who are caught up in their dark mischief. *

''I like my job,'' declares Kat Colorado, a private investigator who makes her debut in Karen Kijewski's KATWALK (Dunne/St. Martin's, $16.95), winner of the Private Eye Writers of America's contest for the ''best first private eye novel'' of 1988. This new operative also likes ''the idea of being a good guy, working for good guys, tipping the cosmic scale a little in the right direction.''

Kat demonstrates that she's one of the good guys in this carefully plotted and briskly paced adventure, which finds the California p.i. nosing around Las Vegas on behalf of a friend who suspects her soon-to-be ex-husband of deliberately depleting their common assets. The detective barely deplanes before she barges into a contract killing and meets up with some heavy-hitter mobsters.

Ms. Kijewski shows skill in turning the nuts and bolts of this hard-boiled story, if not enough imagination or literary style to disguise its formulaic characters and content. Kat's lone-wolf investigative style, for example, doesn't make sense when she's got a police detective in her bed and a reporter in her corner. You'd think one of these good buddies would get on this major case - not because they're men, but because they're professionals.

On her first time out, the author got all the genre conventions down pat. Next time, maybe she'll give them a good shove.